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Wednesday, October 30, 2013

Stephen King's Best Books: #2 -- Pet Sematary

#2 Pet Sematary

The #2 spot in the countdown is occupied by Pet
Sematary [1983], which in my opinion qualifies as Stephen King’s darkest, scariest
book. Here’s the gist of the novel:

When Dr. Louis Creed moves his family from
Chicago to Ludlow, Maine, their new neighbor, an elderly man named Jud
Crandall, warns Louis to keep his children away from the highway that runs past
their house, which trucks from a nearby chemical plant frequently pass at dangerously
high speeds. After his daughter’s cat,
Church, is stuck on the road, Jud reveals a terrible community secret: hidden in the woods beyond Louis’s property is
an ancient burial ground that was once used by the Micmac Native American tribe
to bring the dead back to life.

Jud leads Louis deep into the woods to the
burial ground, where they bury the cat. But
when Church returns home, it is clear that something is wrong: the cat is more violent and aggressive than
before, and stinks of the grave.

Things take an even more tragic turn when
Louis’s two-year old son, who’d recently learned to walk, wanders into the road
and is similarly killed by a speeding truck.
Overcome with grief, Louis becomes intrigued by the prospect of digging
up Gage’s body and taking it to the ancient burial ground to return his son to
life. Guessing Louis’s plan, Jud tries
to dissuade him by sharing an incident from World War II, where a local resident
had used the burial ground to resurrect his son, Timmy Baterman, who’d been
killed in combat. But what returned from
the burial ground wasn’t Timmy Baterman—it was a demon possessing Timmy’s body
that terrorized the town for several days until the regretful father killed
them both by burning the house down with them inside.

Undeterred by Jud’s warning, Louis carries
out his plan… with deadly consequences for those around him.

That’s all I can reveal without giving too
much away. Creepy and surreal, Pet
Sematary delivers an unprecedented supernatural wallop. Particularly memorable are the terrifying portrayal
of the thing wearing Gage’s skin when he returns from the grave and Louis’s
descent into desperate lunacy as the situation unfolds. I’m not suggesting that Pet Sematary is
Stephen King’s best work from a literary standpoint, but it is undoubtedly his
scariest.

But being King’s scariest novel wasn’t enough
to push this book to the top of this list.

The book was poorly adapted into
an entirely forgettable movie in 1989, noteworthy only for the scenes toward
the end of the film where Gage comes back from the dead. If your lasting impression of this work was formulated by the movie, then I'd suggest giving the book a try instead.